"It is crucially important to preserve the Caspian Sea as a zone of peace," Russia's Foreign Minister added

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov

MOSCOW, November 21. /ITAR-TASS/. Military presence of outer states in the Caspian Sea is unacceptable, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a group studying the sea's legal status.

“It is crucially important to preserve the Caspian Sea as a zone of peace, friendship and good neighborly relations,” he said. “Russia is determined to stick to the existing agreements about all principal Caspian issues only within the Five (Caspian coastal states — Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Iran) whose members have exclusive sovereign rights to the sea and its resources.”

However, these tasks faced the obstacle of “attempts by some countries and organizations located quite far from the Caspian to impose their interests and their course on the Caspian littoral states”, even setting them against each other, he said.